The emperor's clothes... and Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxymore

 

The twenty-second studio album from one of the grand masters of visionary electronic music has been released as an homage to Pierre Henry, and Jarre's official website presents it as "conceptually his most ambitious and groundbreaking to date".

If one approaches it with quite a few decades of Jarre fandom and almost equal number of decades of audio engineering experience under one's belt, the impulse to state a few non-subjective facts about this album becomes uncontrollable. 

Thus, it is easiest to describe what this album is not...  and these facts definitely contradict the  bandwagoning and artificial, thoughtless applauding in quite a few music publications.

One has to start with the claim that this is Jarre's most ambitious and groundbreaking studio album... 

The listener may have been fascinated by the paradox of the recent Equinoxe Infinity album, which was released with great hype about its futuristic visions - but the album contained highly self-conscious nostalgia and re-iterations of the past (down to the use of specific 1970s sounds from the original Equinoxe), combined with quasi-desperate EDM trendiness and shockingly antiquated, even banale, sound sample manipulations from the mid-1980s. 

If that listener wishes to revisit those mixed feelings, then Oxymore is another perfect album for that. 

Pierre Henry was undoubtedly a trailblazer with huge influence on Jarre, too. In 2022, chopping of samples of his speech (and other sounds) is not only far from groundbreaking or ambitious creativity, it is not even something of the present. Nor is time stretching, or rapid modulation of audio synthesis parameters. What we hear throughout the album, in terms of the sounds used as rhythmic or pitch-pattern elements, could be and has been done, admittedly more tediously, in the mid-to-late 1980s already. 

Ambitious and groundbreaking creativity is not tens of minutes of rapid changes to sound localisation in stereo or surround sound space, applied to almost all sequenced patterns and lead motifs. Well, lead sounds, as one has to challenge misty-eyed reviewers (who are using words they prove not to understand at all) to name a single musical motif they remember after the album listening ends. There are none, albeit this one is, naturally, a subjective take. 

So let's paddle back to the waters of objective analysis via a trajectory that is much less jagged and histrionic than the sound processing on the entire album...

The sorely missed Klaus Schulze or any grand master of the Berlin School of EM have demonstrated decades ago how on-the-surface monotonous sounding sequenced sounds can actually contain a Universe of myriad changes, subtleties, fluid and spirited movements that can enchant the brain. 

What we have on Oxymore is a robotic, exactly repeating sequencing in many places, where musically or even sonically there is zero change - whilst other layers of sounds are trying to mask this with the aforementioned aggressive, constantly jumping-around, aimless modulations of filters, envelopes, distortion effects, and spatial localisation. 

Do we recall Moon Machine, from the album Images or the single? If one takes away all the structural development, and puts its sequencing, panning, and rhythm programming through a MIDI randomizer plugin that changes control parameters rapidly... we would get something very close to the majority of the "tracks" on Oxymore. But... Moon Machine was created then released in the mid-1980s...

Some called the new album Zoolook 2. Once again, one (in a by-now thoroughly irritated manner) has to conclude that some, simply and factually, have no idea why Zoolook was astonishingly imaginative, innovative, and why it holds up even in 2022 as a seriously "wow" electronic album. Oxymore would only be a Zoolok 2 if it had used current synthesis and re-synthesis methods in a way that it pushes them far beyond what everybody else is doing at the moment with them. 

Using 1980s garbling of audio samples, 1990s grain synthesis, time stretching based on the same granular technology that has been around us for decades etc. is not even reaching the level of what other (experimental or mainstream) electronic artists have been doing for years, if not decades. 

The one area of innovation where Oxymore can fairly claim novelty status is, ironically, not in electronic music - it is in visual and immersive virtual reality realm.

In mixing and mastering, sure, there are state-of-the art audio techniques employed - the Dolby Atmos mix makes it something worth listening to, from a sonic experience and technical viewpoint... at most. 

The supreme irony of this album is that if this was to be any kind of true homage to Pierre Henry, it could have been a cerebral sonic collage or any form of 'experimental' electronic music - instead of something abundant in desperately trendy drum machine beats and many EDM clichés.

The subject area where it is quite near-impossible to write anything objective is certainly the musical one. Does Oxymore contain anything more than jarring, random, overdone, and sometimes, for prolonged sections, robotically monotonous sonic puree from a high-powered blender?

Well, let's attempt a not purely subjective answer based on a look at Jarre's first few albums released almost four and a half decades ago... and Oxymore.

The astounding imagination that resulted in the groundbreaking Oxygene and Equinoxe albums was both technical and musical. Fascinating creativity fought with rudimentary technology, pushing it to its limits, in order to create something fluid, otherworldly, yet so human that it even contained memorable hummable tunes... and evergreen EM "hits". 

It is deeply ironic, that all the hype around Oxymore simply cannot hide the glaringly obvious fact that, apart from the mentioned mixing/mastering technology and the multimedia materials accompanying the album's sonic content, Oxymore does not bring anything new that makes erudite or non-erudite listeners sit up on hearing unprecedented flights of imagination.

One could put up even with pure technological innovation in the "tracks" when it comes to sound synthesis, but all one hears is regurgitated decades-old technology hammered-on with the higher speed modulation capabilities of modern software. 

Jarre stated that he feels "sorry for those afraid of the future". Quite rightly so. However, his depiction of future is robotically re-using decades-old EM tropes pushed to the extreme, while the visuals are quasi-monochromatic, as sterile and industrial-looking as the CGI in Tron was in the early 1980s... or a modern rendering of the gloomy industrial cityscapes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis from the mid-1920s... If this is the future, then, unfortunately, we should be worried about a return to the visions of 1950s dystopian science fiction...

Even if one let the hype-vs-reality contradictions of the "futuristic" Equinoxe Infinity pass despite its dense 1970s (and clichéd 1990s) references, it is impossible to do so in the case of Oxymore. The emperor, this time, really isn't wearing any clothes. 

Living, breathing, pulsating Amazônia - an immersive new work from Jean-Michel Jarre

Amazônia is an immersive exhibition focusing on the Brazilian Amazon, based on more than 200 photographs and other media by legendary photographer and filmmaker Sebastião Salgado. He had spent six years in the region, capturing the natural elements and the local cultures.

Electronic music legend Jean-Michel Jarre has composed and recorded a musical score for the exhibition. 

The first and rather central aspect is that this, after many years, marks a return to an ambiental, even musique concrète, soundworld that Jarre fans may know from only a few seminal works.

Apart from some of Jarre's early, pre-Oxygène, works, we have only heard this compositional approach in his sampling-based classic album Zoolook and in the mesmerising, final track of Waiting For Cousteau.

Amazônia will certainly "disappoint" Jarre fans who expect musical output that is either in the vein of unashamedly nostalgic re-visiting of classic albums like Equinoxe or in the quite heavily EDM-leaning mainstream electronic works we could hear in recent years. 

It is not an album with driving sequences and rhythm patterns, certainly not one with sonic fireworks. There is something of the intimacy of the album Sessions 2000 in this, it feels and sounds like a highly personal project with great attention to detail. 

An interesting aspect is that the album's many natural sounds are not actually field-recorded sounds, instead, they were created and/or assembled in Jarre's studio. 

It is impossible to do a track-by-track 'usual' review of the album, as it is an overall sonic experience, with numbered tracks that seamlessly flow into each other. If we think of Tangerine Dream's Zeit or Atem, Vangelis's delicate and intricately minimalistic Soil Festivities, well, Amazônia firmly positions itself in that type of sonic Universe.

Perhaps the most charming aspect of the work is how the countless tiny details combine and how they change. We have occasional appearances of melodic motifs, very subtle sequences, pulsations, but the centre stage is occupied by the sonic elements that conjur the world of the Amazon rainforest. 

It is a symphony of a very special and subdued kind, where the listener is trusted to pay attention to numerous tiny changes in the sounds and the musical elements. There are moments of 'tangible' electronic music, between ambiental soundscapes that seem to purely come into being  and exist without any human intervention.

Admittedly, this blogger admires that particular quality in some seminal works by other EM greats like the aforementioned ones and certainly in works by Klaus Schulze - thus,  in the case of Amazônia we are invited to an, overused word perhaps nowadays, immersive experience.

Amazônia simply seems to exist, filling the available space, floating in the air, with myriad infinitesimal sonic elements that arrange themselves into a veritable constellation of natural sounds. 

It is music, it is a sound, for introspective times - whilst it can be as abstract as some works by Brian Eno, the evocation of the natural world works splendidly, and gives the album a highly organic feel. 

This is not musique concrète that escaped from the labs of some electronic pioneers, not a sterile collage of natural and electronic sounds... It seems to breathe and have currents, undercurrents, pulsations of some greater organism - it has life.

As a landmark in the Jarre discography, Amazônia is a rare and unexpected change of direction after years of adventures in increasingly mainstream electronic music sub-genres. It is a surprise, and if the listener enjoyed Waiting For Cousteau or the sonic introspections of Ethnicolor from Zoolook, that listener will find Amazônia a mesmerising sonic journey. 

The infinite from the ephemeral: Jean-Michel Jarre's EoN generative music app

Generated image of EoN infinite music app

Generative music has a surprisingly long history... It goes back to an era that very much predates famous and often-quoted examples, like those of Brian Eno's Koan.

While Eno has made the term 'generative music' enter the public consciousness, what it denotes existed for many decades before.

In many ways its origins can be traced back to some stunningly innovative work from the 1950s, for example the first ever work entirely composed by a computer: the Illiac Suite from 1957. Even now, this string quartet remains a remarkably human and spirited work, especially considering that it was entirely generated via algorithmic means.

Another major landmark is Iannis Xenakis's pioneering work on the formalisation of music, i.e. approaching music from a mathematical, more specifically stochastic, angle - and creating the possibility of describing music as a stochastic process.

His revolutionary Musiques Formelles, published in 1963, was already based on his extensive analyses and experimentations dating back to the 1950s. It, too, was the basis for numerous computer compositions from the 1960s and later.

In a far less mathematical manner, electroacoustic experiments done with tape loops could be considered as early, and very much analogue, ways of creating generative music. The slow and mesmerising interplay of timing relationships between tape loops, as used by minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich, was used by many subsequently... even in Brian Eno's Music For Airports, almost a decade after Reich's seminal It's Gonna Rain.

The explosion and affordability of personal computers and mobile devices meant that myriad software creations, including phone apps, could bring generative music to the masses. The list of various algorithmic, including fractal-based, composition tools is quasi-endless by now.

After decades of efforts from aforementioned Brian Eno, too, comes yet another piece of software as an iOS app. It was launched under the name EoN by the ever-youthful Jean-Michel Jarre, with software coding by Alexis Zbik and Vianney Apreleff.

Conceptually, it has its roots situated closer to the area of generative music from the realm of certain computer games, where considerable amount of human-composed music material is re-combined / re-arranged by software.

However, in the case of EoN, the result is structured as an actual album. Whilst it relies on seven hours of music composed by Jarre, the software ends up generating a potentially infinite album.

Furthermore, it alters the result every time anybody runs it - so it produces myriad instances of evolving music, in some ways turning the ephemeral and local (i.e. the moment and the personal instance of the app used by a certain person) into something eternal and expansive.

Thus, philosophically, it is an interesting exercise, especially as the resulting concept album is not just some slowly floating ambient drone as, alas, some generative music ends up being. The demo illustrates just how varied the resulting musical output can be.

Another notable aspect is that one does not just end up with the generated music: there are endless generated visual effects, too, hence the experience can become quite mesmerising indeed.

As musical elements are endlessly re-arranged into evolving constructs, EoN is an interesting combination of algorithmic, accidental, and pre-composed approaches to generative music. Using Jarre's original material, not only the music gets infinitely re-combined in countless ways, but each specific 'instance' of the infinite album is different. If one re-starts it, it will generate yet another different album... and it is up to us, and the available electricity supply, how long we let it play.

In terms of duration, this 'infinite' album certainly goes beyond the mere 639 years that the organ version of John Cage's As Slow As Possible will take to perform... assuming that batteries or any electrical energy source connected to the device running EoN lasts...

Retro futures, futuristic retrospectives: Equinoxe Infinity by Jean-Michel Jarre

Four decades after the seminal album Equinoxe, one of the most significant artists of the French School of electronic music has released a concept album that is tightly connected with that memorable epic from the late '70s.

It is concerned with the advent of artificial intelligence and the increasing digitisation of our lives. As Jean-Michel Jarre put it in a recent interview, after a somewhat disappointing contrast between what we idealistically expected from the new millennium and what we actually had in terms of technology, we are returning to that sense of wonder about the future.

Whilst the album intends to imagine what the world may look like in 40 years' time, both with its utopian and rather more dystopian elements, it embraces eminently retro technology, too - together with state-of-the-art production. Jarre has used some of his earliest analogue synths in his arsenal, hence sonic references to his first two albums are abundant - but we have also the latest digital technology eminently present in the journey that Equinoxe Infinity is.

As with the second and third installment of what has become the Oxygene trilogy, it was quite a task to make the album sound contemporary, make it stand on its own, yet directly reference the instantly recognisable sonic world that made the originals into major landmarks of the history of electronic music.

The opening track, The Watchers, has those direct references in the arrangements, yet the main musical motif is surprisingly Vangelis-esque in its gentle melancholy and the inflections - one is reminded of Oceanic.

Flying Totems injects considerable energy and synth-pop DNA into the mixture of different moods that the album gradually proves to be. The layers of sequenced motifs and electronic effects are self-consciously pointing us toward the Jarre sound of the late 1970s, with catchy and soaring melodic lead lines - an instant lift after the meditative opening of the album.

Robots Don't Cry is continuing the very direct references to the percussion, sequencer and melodic patterns of Oxygene and Equinoxe of yesteryear, including that characteristic glissando - whilst some bass arrangements are quite here-and-now...

All That You Leave Behind maintains that tight connection with the 1970s soundworld in Jarre's discography, whilst the melody and the overall mood of the track is of almost anthemic nature.

If The Wind Could Speak and Infinity show the age-old truth: simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. Both tracks are charming in the purity and simplicity of the melodic lines, the latter is quite  typical chart material - with the chorus and its arrangements making again very direct references to the opening track of the 1978 album's B side. So is the way in which blends into Machines Are Learning, the 7th movement, with the sequencer pattern reminding us, probably quite intentionally, of the former album.

Both aforementioned movements 5 and 6 tracks also introduce processed and pitch-shifted vocal sounds. In 2018, one could forgive listeners for thinking just how retro this all sounds... If one recalls the mind-blowing innovative world of Zoolook from the early 1980s (at a time where most used the revolutionary Fairlight sampler for just pedestrian playback of samples), this use of vocal samples in 2018 strikes one as quite conservative, even trivial.

The Opening continues with tight bass sequences reminiscent of the 1978 album, showing again a conscious choice of synth sounds to reference the B-side of that LP. It is another driving and high-octane, unashamedly happy and entertaining track.

Don't Look Back is more pensive, the filter sweeps on the white noise and the strings being again firmly rooted in the Jarre sound of the 1970s.

It almost seamlessly blends into the final track, Equinoxe Infinity, which is also a return to both the introspective mood of the opening track and its melody - making us think that perhaps the album will float away with this reprise... However, Jarre treats us to an epic build-up of patterns that start off deceptively simple - and lead to a majestic finale, which is all the more effective as it pulls back and calms to an almost ambiental, gentle soundscape in the last seconds of the album.

Overall, it is a structurally very cohesive and flowing concept album, albeit with quite a few gear shifts - it feels more consistent that the recent, and final, installment of the Oxygene trilogy.

There are no sharp changes and sudden corners in Equinoxe Infinity - it has, as the best of Jarre albums do, the ability to fill the room and transport the listener to a highly characteristic sonic Universe.

There are no excesses and there is no self-indulgent technological showing-off, the album is remarkably modest in a good sense...

One central contradictions remains: with all the musings about the future and how this album set out to meditate about how the world will look like in 40 years' time... can we find a single second on this entire album that is electronic music pointing to the future, instead of very self-consciously referencing the past?...

Whether it represents something still novel and unique in the soundscape of the second decade of the 21st century, whether it adds something memorable to the considerable Jean-Michel Jarre story of many decades of electronic music, well, that is a very personal verdict - one for each listener to make...

From oxygen to outer space - Jean-Michel Jarre at 70

Photo: AFP

Jean-Michel Jarre, perhaps the most prominent post-avant-garde names of the French School of electronic music, turned 70 today.

Whilst he was already a prolific experimental and soundtrack composer before the 1976 release of his landmark album Oxygène, the latter has really projected his name onto the firmament of both popular and critically acclaimed electronic music.

Even in 2018, the album sounds futuristic, timeless and perfectly at home with state-of-the-art current space rock and ambient electronic albums - a fluid, bubbling and seamlessly flowing electronic symphony that still continues to hold many lessons for budding electronic musicians who choose to compose with intent a descriptive and emotionally involving sub-genre of electronica.

As they say, the rest is history...

Whilst Jarre has become perhaps even more known for the record-breaking gigantic concerts, where audiences were in their millions (absolute record was 3.5 million people) and the stage could often be an entire city even, his imaginative musical creations cannot be ignored.

His music was seen by some regimes as ideologically clean and "safe", the music of a technological future - hence it is not an accident, that he was the first Western musician officially invited to give live performances in post-Mao China.

While Jarre established himself as an unparalleled visionary when it came to live performances, with hugely innovative multimedia technology at work alongside his futuristic electronica, his use of innovative new musical instruments was also remarkable.

Cities in Concert - Live in Houston, TX

Fairlight, the pioneering sampler that completely changed music across countless genres, was mostly used even by luminaries like Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Art of Noise and Kate Bush as a digital instrument capable of playing back sound samples.

Then Jarre released the to this day astonishing album Zoolook, where he has taken the Fairlight to an unprecedented level, projecting us into a never before heard sonic Universe.

His use of sound processing and alteration via the new instrument sounds simply stunning even today - and all this was not done in a purely academic manner, making Zoolook actually enjoyable by the masses.

Whilst he ventured very happily into the realm of chirpy, dancey, highly trendy electronica, too, we cannot forget the fact that he also composed vast, almost cosmic requiem-sounding suites like Rendez-Vous, and ventured into "pure" electronic ambient music, too (the epic length title track on Waiting for Cousteau).

Even under the surface of sometimes very pop-sounding electronica, he often managed to hide complex musical ideas. A simple example would be Equinoxe, his second album, where the most popular track has employed time signatures that one is challenged to find in any chart-topping creation...

Even in 2018, even at 70, he is not only keeping up with the absolute latest greatest technological advances in sound synthesis, processing and music production, but he remains an influencer and a shaper of sound technology.

His latest studio double opus, the Electronica Vol. I and II., shows how he can collaborate with numerous electronic musicians who come from vastly different musical and technological backgrounds.

The tracks composed with the biggest names, ranging from Vince Clarke to Hans Zimmer to the late Edgar Froese (founder of the veritable Berlin School institution that is Tangerine Dream), show that Jarre's artistic range and sensitivity is able to integrate myriad musical ideas and sources into a coherent concept.

In ways that transcend particular subjective tastes and electronic music preferences, Jarre's trailblazing efforts in the field have left their mark on countless facets of music technology, including creative tools and approaches to the vast world of synthesizers.

His music is also testament to the fact that the most high-tech instruments are mere instruments, and the human using those instruments remains the key factor in the creative process... making the resulting music sometimes unashamedly romantic even, whilst created with (the still often misperceived as "cold") electronics.

Retro progress

Korg ARP Odyssey FS (2017)

The new year began with some retro legends like the ARP Odyssey full-size version hitting the market, as a result of Korg's continued dedication to analogue revival.

However, the somewhat philosophical aspects of this growing retro revival are something notable... and undoubtedly controversial.

The surge in the use of analogue modeling instruments, and then true analogue (new, old or remakes of old) instruments and sonorities has been with us for some time. Even dominant mainstream electronic music trends, also some of the biggest names in some of the very "here and now" electronic music sub-genres (think of Daft Punk), have returned very self-consciously to the analogue sound world.

However, two aspects are of concern - one is related to the instruments themselves with their marketing strategies, and the other related to the new-old and old-new sound aesthetics in the creative thinking.

To begin with the creative aspects, a highly controversial question could be posed very easily while looking at recent decades of synthesizer use. What percentage of musicians create individual, hence new, sounds with the instruments that are, above all, for the synthesis of unlimited palettes of new sounds? How many spend time to sound original, instead of using vast number of presets from vast number of libraries that the vast number of incredibly powerful new instruments offer?

The number is infinitesimal.

One cannot help thinking (not just feeling) that, based on contradictions between what technological progress brought and how much originality is heard whilst using that technology, there is a regressive trend of some proportions.

There are some notable and successful attempts in sounding (or, in case of some of the synth music legends, still sounding) original and exploring ever more stunning new sonic worlds. As in the case of even legendary old-timers like Gary Numan, it means many months of painstaking attention given to the creation of a personal artistic and sonic world that serves the concepts behind their works.

The opposite and considerably more superficial trend is what happens in fashion, too. It may seem like a trivialized parallel, but it could not be more accurate analogy: classic denim trousers of certain tailoring are revived with some twists by a certain brand - and posters say: 'be individual'. With a, one may add, mass-produced piece of clothing that millions wear after the first days or weeks of novelty are over.

Cue the legendary synths of yesteryear, always at some price tag and always with some marketing to make the old legends seem and sound even more individual and personalized.

The superficial and increasingly omnipresent approach to individuality is a musician resorting to the limited edition old-new, new-old, sounds and instrumentation. Oh look, a rare lead line from a Model D revamped version! Ah those filters from the Odyssey! That chorus from the Polysix!

What is happening, and this is factual reality in current electronic music, is the non-functional 'vintage for the sake of vintage' artistic (?) approach. Kudos to those, who integrate the vintage legends into their already individual sonic universe. Again, easiest example is Daft Punk, but going back through the years, even veterans like Jean-Michel Jarre can still use the old in novel ways to this day.

The problem is when the instrument, electronic as it may be, is not an instrument any more. When it is not 'just', with all its specifics and personality, a source of sounds to realize a sound world as imagined by the musician.

When it becomes a goal, instead of being an instrument, then we have the large parts of the analogue revival on our hands... where analog legendary sounds are used without any overall artistic concept, just for their 'refreshing vintage individuality'.

The most bitter irony is when some talk of the analogue warmth these legendary instruments bring and then they use them in the coldest, impersonal and superficial manner.

One does not spend weeks or months shaping his/her sound world, in order to be individual - one resorts to the most recent revived legend and saturates his/her compositions with the vintage sounds (or their emulations). Tada. A new revolution in sound... purely by returning to the past - exactly as one pulls the vintage tailored denim off a shelf.

The marketing of these instruments unfortunately plays very much into this phenomenon, exactly as it did with the mentioned classic pieces of clothing.

The instruments themselves, especially when it comes to the revived legends like the Odyssey and MiniMoog Model D, show a predictable and questionable duality that support the more impersonal and less creative impulses in amateur and established musicians alike - kudos to the increasingly few exceptions.

While they are undoubtedly unique in terms of their characteristic sound, they are highly specialized (and therefore often limited) in their capabilities - as legendary and revolutionary they may have been in their heyday. Their production costs are infinitesimal compared to the originals.

However, their price tag can be hugely out of sync with their physical realities. One, naturally, pays for the name, pays for the legend - and to make the contradictions in the performance-price-manufacturing costs triangle less strident, the manufacturers resort to the emotional side of even hardened electronic musicians.

It is made as very limited edition. It is made by hand. It is, to quote, "aged" before it gets to our studios. It is released in different colors and sizes. Above all, we buy a legend. It is, as one of Ray Bradbury's classic stories says, the haunting of the new.

While manufacturers, even hugely respectable ones with long tradition of sustained innovation, are after the money by releasing different sizes and color versions of the same revived electronic legend, something is deeply wrong. Their interior essence has become less important than their exterior superficial properties.

The electronic and other musicians who use these resurrected oldies for something new, and fuse the newest with sometimes the oldest (think of Theremin revival), are in a tiny minority.

We are chasing something warmer and more human, while we feel drowned in a vastly complex digital world - this is quite acceptable and even predictable, but most of this drowning is our own making as we let the instruments take over rather than be instruments in our creative processes. In many technology areas the same trends and counter-trends occurred and are occurring, as a reaction to some perceived dehumanization.

It is just vastly and deeply ironic, that in some (often mainstream) cases the false perception of some dehumanization results in a mechanical and rather reflex-action reaching for the ultimate in perceived 'warmth' and 'humanity'.

The bad news is, as too many electronic music creations of recent years show, that the result of this mechanical chase for vintage warmth is the very opposite of what the chase was about.

We ended up with countless albums of mass-produced, soul-less and cold electronica that wants to be so desperately individual, like the mentioned denim, that ends up being indistinguishably bland - while reduces, deplorably, the vintage sonic legends, too to mere gimmicks.

As it happened in other areas and in other eras, hopefully this chase for the superficial humanity and warmth again suffers some normalization. Such overcompensation, aided by misguided marketing, has happened countless times - and hopefully this time, too, the revived or genuine vintage legends can occupy a more functional and personalized corner in our studios, in physical and metaphorical sense.

(Post also available on the Niume platform now).

A third breath of Oxygene

The third installment of what has become by now the Oxygene trilogy was released on 2 December.

What made the first Oxygene enduring and extraordinary, even to ears coming across its fluid soundscapes 40 years later, was the fact that in many ways it placed itself outside the language of, albeit early, mainstream electronic music. It was eminently different with its other-wordly, yet accessible, soundscapes and fluid, bubbling, ever-changing structures.

Oxygene 2 was somewhat different, with synth-pop and dance music inflections. The third album cannot escape the compulsion of delving into utterly mainstream and utterly popular sub-genres of electronica.

Its opening is surprising, and surprisingly pleasing, with its scintillating sonic fragments and melodic elements that pop in and out of the sound stage.

The phased vintage string machine pads are present in various places in the album, vintage white noise sweeps and percussion elements, and even the instantly recognizable Elka Synthex (which made Rendez-Vous so magnificent sounding) makes an appearance a few times.

There is pleasing amount of experimentation, there are tracks that sound as if arpeggiators' patterns were chopped randomly to pieces and the melodic fragments bubble up unpredictably from the depth of closing and opening filters.

However, the predictable appearance of in-your-face electronic dance music tracks are quite jarring again. The lush soundscapes being suspended by trendy thumping of not only predictable, but terribly banal and already over-used, beat patterns is not exactly a positive effect. There is Jarre inventiveness at work, but the cliched drum patterns are just too... cliched to ignore.

As with Oxygene 2, the complete changes in mood and direction with much too ordinary dancey interludes manage to utterly ruin the otherwise cohesive flow of the album.

The changes in dynamics and effervescence is not a problem, even the first album had its gear shifts that were perfectly blended with the other tracks - but it would be great to hear any intriguing or innovative spins on mainstream electronica, instead the very tired deja-entendu patterns.

As someone remarked about the deplorable Theo & Thea album some years ago, it would be good to leave the forays into dance electronica to those who do it best - and with innovative ideas.

Otherwise, if we discount the jarring (and unfortunately jarringly banal) outings into EDM territory, Oxygene 3 is again quite a remarkable achievement with eminently state-of-the-art technology behind it.

It is quite endearing, that Jarre in 2016 can still stay fresh and full of ideas, and we tend to take for granted the not everyday feast of being able to keep up to speed with the exponential increase (and at extremely fast pace) of electronic sound producing software and hardware.

It sets an example to many electronic musicians who not only get stuck in their ways, but even start out with genre cliches and are are completely in the grips of the technology that they choose to use.

Imaginative, ever-changing, fluid and surprising in many places - Oxygen 3 delivers. If only we could somehow make abstraction of the intrusions of off-the-shelf EDM sonorities that pop up in a few places...

40 years of Oxygene

Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene was released 40 years ago... and, something that very few synth concept albums succeded, it sounds futuristic even today.

Before the more recent adventures into more commercial electronic music that Jarre has taken fans onto, Oxygene stands out as a minimalist, yet intricate and delicate, electronic symphony.

After Oxygene 2, which introduced some recent mainstream elements into what set out to continue the concept, now comes Oxygene 3 - to be released on 2 December.

It is hard to predict exactly what we shall hear, but in Jarre's own words, "The idea was not to copy the first album, but rather keeping the dogma of embarking listeners on a journey from beginning to end with different chapters, all linked to each other."

Hopefully it will not sway too much into EDM-side of things, specifically trance music (perhaps the mainstream genre where Jarre's influence can be most felt). One might sound retro, but it would be splendid if Oxygene 3 integrates well with the previous two installments. It being released as a box set, which contains the first two albums, too, is perhaps a sign that it will not be radically different in its sonic journeys.

"I tried to keep this minimalist approach for Oxygene 3. Some moments are built around one or two elements, like in the first volume." , states Jarre. "What made the first Oxygene so different at the time, is probably the minimalist aspect, and the fact that there are almost no drums, and I wanted to keep this approach, creating the groove mainly with the sequences and the structure of the melodies only, through an architecture of sounds."

So there we have it... It certainly sounds as if it continues the tradition of the first two volumes (and the well-integrated improvised tracks on the In The Living Room version of the first).

After Electronica Vol 1 & 2, it will be very interesting to see this return to the 40-year-old concept and its unique sonic universe.

Jean Michel Jarre - Electronica Vol. 2

The second installment of Jean-Michel Jarre's major collaborative project has freshly been released on 6 May, and it follows the volume entitled Time Machine.

Perhaps it is a sacrilege to start with a review of the second volume, but personally, not only it feels more cohesive than the first, but also, it brings back a certain majestic feel that he, and very few other, practitioners of electronic music have managed to infuse their compositions with. 

The list of collaborators is, once again, large and illustrious: from Gary Numan to Hans Zimmer to The Orb, there are many legendary names on the track listing.

The flow of this album, from its rather beautiful and economic opening theme right to its reprise heard in the final track, is perhaps much more heroic and even anthemic than the rather caleidoscope-like first volume. 

This is by no means an exhaustive track-by-track review, but one has to pick out a number of tracks to illustrate the span of the material on the album...

There are of course incursions into very strong, driving, and at the same time rather dark, rhythms, too. Exit, featuring Edward Snowden's poignant monologue, is a good example where the very fast-paced electronic background would serve as a perfect soundtrack to a high-octane video illustrating the octets of internet traffic circulating in the myriad network fibres...

However, when one would expect some typical electro-pop when looking at the collaborators listed on some tracks, the surprises keep coming.

Brick England (feat. The Pet Shop Boys) is, with all its lighter tone after the anthemic album intros, a perfect blend of softly melancholic vocal lines and more animated electronics, the tension between the two working superbly. 

Swipe To The Right (feat. Cyndi Lauper) is, again, by no means an '80s or '90s synth-pop tune... Surprisingly, it is rather darker and keeps the album's overall (in a good sense) heroic thrust. What perhaps surprised one the most was the sudden emergence, at the very end of the track, of phased vintage strings and electronic percussion patterns typical of Oxygene.

In the somewhat expected to be "heavier" and darker register, we are not let down... Here For You (feat. Gary Numan) is an instant classic, with Numan's soaring vocals and the almost ode-like electronic backing making yet another very memorable track that would have worked perfectly on any, at the same time dark and uplifting, Numan albums, too.

Why This, Why That and Why? (feat. Yello) takes us to the realms of existentialist meditation, along the lines of what one may have experienced emotionally when listening to Daft Punk's Touch (from Random Access Memories), Here, too, the text, the vocal quality and the electronic atmospherics underpinning the monologue work extremely well for a mood piece.

A purely, in a way ambiental, mood piece of soundscapes and voices, bringing hommage to the electronic instrument creators Leon Theremin and Bob Moog, is the Switch on Leon (feat. The Orb). These Creatures (feat. Julia Holter) starts with a sonic surprise, when for a few seconds of her vocals we may think we landed in Laurie Anderson's O Superman... but the track evolves rapidly into a blend of crystalline vocals by Julia and gentle electronics in the background

There is even a pinch of Hollywood greatness here... Electrees (feat. Hans Zimmer) is far from some  mere snippet of symphonic soundtrack, though. Admittedly a pleasant surprise is not only the structurally well-rounded short track that can take the listener through a number of emotional levels, but so is the absence of minimalist string patterns one may have expected. Instead, it is a lush piece with patterns actually coming from the very electronic-sounding sequencer voices, giving nice counterpoint to the very organic (incl. choral) lead lines.

The final two tracks return to "pure" Jarre, in the sense of them not listing collaborators or co-composers, and nicely round off the album material with a reprise of the opening theme, too. 

Overall, a very noteworthy outing that follows Electronica Vol. 1 - with the upcoming tours featuring material from these two albums, too, it will be interesting to see how the collaborative pieces are presented in concert settings (without the featured musicians).